


in another world i was you, and you were me, and it wasnt any easier

by davepetasprite



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kidswap, Misgendering, Rose-Centric, Trans Dave Strider, Trans Rose Lalonde, bc it's. bro, takes place before rose realises shes trans so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-23 21:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11998494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/davepetasprite/pseuds/davepetasprite
Summary: Your last name is Strider, and that is the single most important thing about you.





	in another world i was you, and you were me, and it wasnt any easier

**Author's Note:**

> further elaboration on the warning tags is necessary, so: expect bro's canon-typical physical/emotional abuse and neglect (strifing, not supplying food in the apartment, etc). rose doesn't know she's trans but has never corrected dave's assumption that she's a girl so the misgendering mainly occurs from rose herself (referring to herself as a guy, etc)  
> [bro gave her a different birthname but i'm never gonna use it--'rose' is the first alias she used for herself online and it stuck]
> 
> anyway rose strider continues to fascinate and terrify me altho at some point during this fic i stopped writing it to be safely consumed by others i just. kept going. character study
> 
> takes place long before sburb. the kids are likely about 12 in this

You cram the bar into your mouth, the wrapper empty and dropping to the pavement behind you. Fishing a packet of chips from your sylladex with one hand, you brace the other against a fence and vault over, dropping to the other side and landing silently on an uncaptchalogued skateboard. This is one you made yourself in workshop; you were banned from the metalworking machines when a teacher found you trying to forge a new set of sai. You were surprised she thought she could stop you from doing anything—with your track record, she must've had one hefty fuckin' set to even dare approach you with a complaint. But it's whatever; you complied easily and you're sure she near collapsed with relief when you didn't show your usual recalcitrance. It's not like you're left wanting for weaponry with all the shit Bro keeps around the apartment, even if most of them are irreparably shitty—just like the board, actually. The wheels are artfully crooked and the wood is so splintered it barely holds your weight, creaking every time you hit a crack in the pavement and threatening to snap when you kickflip over the curb. You could've made a much better board, but where's the irony in making something good? Controlling such a piece of shit with your usual finesse just proves how good you are at skateboarding.

You skim down the sidewalk, breathing in exhaust fumes and secondhand smoke from some civillian waiting to cross the street as you chow down on stolen chips. Listen, Bro doesn't exactly give you an allowance—you gotta eat somehow. You figure if the guy behind the register doesn't have the balls to chase you down after you leave the store with a sylladex full of unpaid-for goods, he doesn't really _deserve_ to keep them. The fact that most people can't even see the blur you leave behind when you flashstep through the aisles doesn't register—or maybe it does. You just don't fucking care.

Striders are way too cool to have a moral compass.

When the bag's empty you let it tumble to the ground, licking the residue off your chapped lips and tipping the board to the right, clipping down over the curb and coasting across the road. The angry honks from cars don't get past the headphones in your ears, blaring some Eminem song corrupted beyond recognition with your music-editing software—you think this is the one that you bass-boosted, pitch-lowered, and overlaid with Snoopy's Christmas played backwards at 0.5 the speed. A weaker man's ears would be bleeding. A car brakes sharply in the road as you pass in front of it, and a fist waves angrily from the window. You flip it off without pause and keep going. Something tugs at the peripheral of your finely-tuned instincts and you jerk your head down in a sharp nod, just enough to dislodge your shades an inch so you can use the edges like a rearview mirror—behind you the car slams into a parking spot and a beefy guy the colour of a fucking tomato climbs out of the driver's seat. You allow yourself the barest glint of a smirk, and swerve off slowly down an alley between two residential houses.

You keep a close eye on the dude as he chases you down, his enraged reflection in your shades getting bigger. Calculating the distance between the back of your head and his outstretched hand to the nearest instant, you stop dead as his fingers brush your hair, flashstepping to the side and leaving your skateboard in his path. Your phone uncaptchalogues with a single word and you turn the camera on him, capturing the sicknasty splintering noise as he loses his leg to the unbearably shitty wooden beartrap of your board and goes ass-up, slamming into the pavement and taking out a trashcan on the way down. You flashstep back into prime position amidst the splinters and keep rolling, immortalising his garbage-smeared duds and the throbbing veins at his temple on film. You'll post this to one of your blogs later; yet another addition to a stream of captionless, contextless videos of people eating the absolute shit in delirious hilarity. It's your current project: critiquing society's consumption and subsequent romantisation of violence in media by becoming a content creator and tearing the system down from the inside.

At least, that's one layer of irony you've painstakingly coated it with. Some viewers like to see it as just another source of cringe compilations. It's all an elaborate ruse entrenched in removed half-sincerities and hardboiled meta-commentary—and you're the only one who can truly appreciate the lengths to which you go to keep it real. Although your Bro considers himself a god-tier irony ninja and keeps tabs on most of them, even he can't understand the intricacies of its multitudes.

Your acquaintance Lalonde likes to think he can. Dude seems to take it upon himself to unravel your every tangled web of irony, getting deeper into the lore than even Jade tries to. He doesn't do too bad of a job, but he's unnervingly good at ripping your shit up and undermining your brand by posting his analysis publically to his stupidly popular blog. In retort, you've begun the initial draft of a webcomic so drenched in inconceivable levels of removal and threads of irony both whisper-thin and all-encompassing that even he won't be able to take it apart—it's gonna drive him in-fucking-sane of the most clinical degree. He'll finally tear down the conspiracy wall of red thread and newspaper clippings he devotes one section of his room to for keeping track of your content and set it alight before tossing his sordid corpse on the pyre. He _deserves_ the mental turmoil for thinking he can actually understand the shit you make. It's supposed to be absolutely pregnant with the writhing, howling fetus of incomprehensible irony and encrypted JPEG trash articles, to go down in the annuls of history on a masterlist of 'weirdest blogs you can find without going to the deep web'—not to be surgically dissected and examined by some hipster journalist with a taxidermy fetish.

Like, for real, Lalonde is one of your closest associates—you could be persuaded to facetiously extend him the label of best bro—but that doesn't mean he's inherently gifted a first-class ticket to evaluating your psyche and documenting your otherwise indecipherable inside jokes. Fucking Strider-eyes-only up in this shit. You're officially cordoning off your brain's heterogeneity and labelling it a No-Lalonde zone by smearing it with the feces of unintelligable humour. You'll see what he makes of that.

Put it in your fucking pipe and smoke it, Lalonde.

But you're getting ahead of yourself. There's still the mess in front of you, wasting your time by staying on the ground and staring, horrified, at the blood on the pavement. He turns slowly to face the camera and you give the slightest of nods, appreciating the showmanship of a slow turn and the dramatic reveal of a broken nose. His eyes about bulge outta their fucking sockets. You shift your weight just slightly to the left. When he finally gets to his feet and lunges, you keep your phone focused on him with a steady hand and draw a sword from your specibus. Stepping to the side again, at regular speed this time, you swing it over his head as he barrels past and take just a _little_ off the top. Chunks of hair hit the ground like a stripper's panties on Ladies Night as he jerks to a stop and grabs at his scalp, looking for blood but finding only bare skin. You're fucking good with a blade—he really should have more faith in your skills. He yells again and tries to grab you, but you've gotten bored. You think you're done with this guy. Today he gets to walk away with a nice clean combover and a -1 to teeth. You turn your phone off and 'log it, folding your hands behind your back and ducking under his arms as he lunges past you again.

This guy's not going to let you go without a fight—you know from experience, all 'roided up meatblocks are the same—so you conclude your transaction by slamming the butt of your sword's handle into the soft spot just under his ribs and flashstepping around the end of the alley as he collapses.

You take the long route home so the uncontrollable tremor in your hands has time to fade.

 

You end up hitting up a few more food joints on your way back after checking the stocks of food in your sylladex and finding them unsatisfactory. Sometimes Bro skims your stash—on days where your strifing skills are deemed sub-par, he empties it out entirely. You've devoted weeks to figuring out his method of cache-hacking with little success. You find that it's easier to eat whatever food you steal when you're out of the apartment, then hide the leftovers in random places when you get back. He rarely finds all of your hiding spots, so you don't tend to starve like you used to—unless you're being especially lax. You have to have enough supplies to last for training days, as well. Those are the days where he blocks the apartment door and won't let you leave until you can land a hit on him.

Sometimes the days can stretch into weeks.

You've got a dozen cans of food hidden in the spaces of the cinder blocks that hold up the furniture in your room for those occasions, so you're hardly hindered by your own incompetence when you fail his simple tests for that long.

You're just leaving a corner store with several cards of food and grape soda when the chime of a notification pauses your music and makes you... react. You don't jump, and certainly not in shock—any embarrassing surprise has surely been trained out of you by now, but you do... tense. Slightly. Then you relax, because that particular notification is just from your brother leaving a comment on one of your newer blogs. A few years back, when you started leaving the apartment by yourself, you enlisted Egbert's help to set up a system of alerts that can only be triggered by someone from your I.P. address commenting on one of your accounts. It's not as though you weren't entirely capable of doing the coding yourself, but her assistance saved time, and you aren't exactly a patient person. It's often the only way Bro contacts you when you're out. If he has to actually text you, you know you fucked something up on a galactic scale and it's time to get your ass back to have it handed to you on the wrong side of a sword. You lean against the storefront as you quickly track down the comment—he tends to delete them after a few minutes to keep you on your toes.

420HOMO commented 30 seconds ago...

Kid. Home. Now.

Fuck. Your mind races ahead, trying to run through all the scenarios that could've left him pissed. What did you do this time? Often he doesn't even tell you, blurring back into the shadows and leaving only a grinning Lil Cal to watch you get to your knees and drag yourself to the bathroom to patch yourself up without a word. You assume it's to keep you vigilant—but to what end, you're unsure. It would probably mess with the head of a lesser teen. Good thing Bro raised you to be better than everyone else.

You start heading back. There's a wide margin between 'ironically early' and 'ironically-fashionably late' that you don't wanna hit when Bro gives you these ultimatums, so you have to time yourself carefully. You're too far away for the early achievement, but sometimes there's an overlap between what you intended to be 'ironically late' and what Bro sees as just completely disrespectful, yo. You're completely certain that there's a correlation between the difficulty level of his strifes and how thoroughly you comply with his demands.

Though sometimes it can be difficult to tell.

theionThaumaturge [TT] began pestering  trenchantGoliath [TG]

TT: hey new posts up  
TT: tell me what you think cmon  
TT: lay it right on me i reckon this ones a solid 4.5 outta 5 ugly ass hats  
TT: covering all 4.5 bald spots on 30 yo brothers w weird ventriloquist fetishes  
TT: haha youre gonna tear me a new one when u get these lmao ik brother mockery is all but verboten  
TT: im looking forward to it tbh todays been kinda dull on the discourse front  
TT: haters cant handle the truth i lay down all over their asses  
TT: i press refresh on reddit for like 10 minutes and whatve they got growing in their fields of retorts?  
TT: jack shit is what  
TT: behold the field in which i grow my fucks i guess  
TT: the cup of that particular harvest runneth over like no mans business  
TT: but hey dont let me talk your ear off  
TT: its gonna be a whole page of red if you dont start interjecting w ur signature undying praise  
TT: youre kinda late on the whole rate comment and subscribe part of our relationship and i cant say im sympathetic  
TT: like you know my entire personality revolves around the support and adoration of my friends n fans  
TT: not that the two groups are mutually exclusive  
TT: oh shit just realised i said relationship isnt that just a thing haha  
TT: see if youd been here u couldve jumped on that like a starving lioness on some bloody zebra rump  
TT: but you took too long  
TT: now the moments gone  
TT: ok but for real hop on that link and tell me whatcha think  
TT: be the thermodynamic supply to my heat sink  
TT: ok now heres the part where you jump on the end of my ersatz poem and turn it into some convoluted rap lmfao  
TT: oh wait actually before you read that post u should totes check out the sweet pics i snapped of the mermajackaloupe i just put up  
TT: btw your idea to add cat paws to it was pretty genius tbh  
TT: its like subtle but sorta pushes the thing over into the uncanny valley of rabbit-deer-cat-fish hybrids  
TT: even if it made me pretty sad to depaw a cat carcass but like  
TT: moms experiments with cloning do tend to generate a lot of...........uh  
TT: biological waste  
TT: in the tearjerking form of mutant cats  
TT: but im fine with it i guess  
TT: dead things is dead things?? that right theres a FACT  
TT: haha ok i guess youll be online later talk to u then

\-- TT is a idle chum! --

TG: You realise you're undermining my stock value by laying your analysis of my otherwise inscrutable motivations all out in the fuckin' open like this.  
TT: there she is  
TG: Yeah. It's me.  
TG: I hope you appreciate how lucky you are that I haven't blocked you yet.  
TG: This level of disrespect? Nigh intolerable.  
TT: nah you love me lmfao  
TT: you act like u just barely tolerate me but end of the day u love that anyone engages w u like this  
TG: Love is a construct maintained by and for people who can't handle the thought of dying alone.  
TG: I'm more than capable of living my own life and facing its subsequent end without relying upon some unhealthy attachment to whatever naive fuckstick happens to lay down in my path and refuse to move unless I grace them with a diamond ring and a shared mortgage, or whatever the fuck passes as romantic overtures for normies.  
TT: normies  
TT: fuck i love seeing you use that word its the funniest fuckin thing  
TT: best part is youre even using it genuinely asdfgfd  
TG: You're getting your wires crossed on this one, Lalonde. I only ever engage in that particular vernacular as an ironic nod to the subculture I'm satirizing.  
TT: BULL......  
TT: shit!!!!!!  
TT: and we both know it  
TT: there isnt a trace of your fucked up idea of irony in ur distaste for romantic shit  
TT: nor is there in your use of the word normies bc u literally like to think youre above everyone else  
TT: i say you LIKE to think that bc like, rly  
TT: you know its horseshit  
TG: Did your mother finally lift the house-wide ban on outdated psychology textbooks?  
TT: thats fuckin deflection rose!!! haha oh man i gotchu good  
TT: rly hit the nail on the head n now youre tryina jerk the wheel to the right so u miss this giant line o' spikes i laid out on the road for u w my veracious polemic  
TT: well it isnt gonna work rose your tires are already blown to shit  
TT: book em boys  
TG: These photographs are rather good, BTW.  
TT: hell yes  
TT: what do you like about them  
TG: I find the lighting to be suitably dramatic. The juxtaposition of the soft orchid background with the ragged, monstrous proportions of this particular taxidermy hybrid is just jarring enough to be haunting, but not outright disturbing.  
TG: Also, you've improved significantly since your first proto-hybrid.  
TT: and..?  
TG: I'll remain subscribed to your account for future creations.  
TT: and........??  
TG: 4.4 mummified claws out of 5.  
TT: oh shit!  
TT: is that my highest score yet?  
TG: To memory.  
TT: sweet  
TT: you spoil me lmao  
TT: and what about the other post, what do you think of that one  
TG: You know I can't disclose the details of my future rejoiners, Lalonde.  
TG: That would not only sabbotage the integrity of my online persona, but devalue the eventual response and taint the viewing experience of my content's consumers.  
TT: our contents consumers you mean  
TG: Whatever.  
TT: hmmmm  
TT: hmmmmmmmmmmm  
TT: hm  
TG: What?  
TT: you seem a lil more flippant than usual  
TT: and not in your like....normal way  
TT: and you wrote sabotage w two bs  
TT: you all good?  
TG: I don't know what you mean.  
TT: i mean are you like, alright  
TT: this is a general inquiry into your wellbeing im pretty sure  
TT: i know i know, alien concept  
TT: is something up?  
TG: No.  
TG: I have to go.  
TT: brother calling you for dinner or something?  
TG: Sure. Something like that.  
TT: ok, ttyl rose

\-- TG is an idle chum! --

TT: btw dont even think we arent unpacking that whole 'something like that' line later  
TT: also i like the name on your new blog  
TT: or uh  
TT: like your third most recent blog i think  
TT: fuck how long until you reach total blog saturation point  
TT: but yeah its a nice name, good persona, solid craftsmanship  
TT: 5 outta 5 fake blogs  
TT: do you use like a random name generator when making these things or would that undermine the irony of having so many in the first place  
TT: wait here let me answer that for you i got my rose strider rp DOWN  
TT: TG: Why Dave, how dare you insinuate that I would perform the social media equivalent of mass-production.  
TT: TG: These personas are hand-crafted, artisanal constructs, coming straight from the heart I do so adore to claim I lack. To be otherwise would be to liken my life's work to that of a spam-bot.  
TT: you know actually i meant to make those more facetious but tbh? theyre spot fucking on  
TT: i dont even need the real you in here anymore ill just write u into these chats artificially  
TT: wouldnt have to suffer the oppressive loneliness of an unresponsive pesterchum chat  
TT: haha jk ok but anyway yeah see you when youre done doing whatever it is u gotta do  
TT: im looking forward to reading your response wrt me tearing the walls of ur internet home down around u  
TT: but anyway  
TT: see ya  


\-- TT changed their mood to offline! --

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea where im going with this but can you tell that i love exploring bro strider's inflated ego thru the medium of rose's inherent stuffy pride and opinionated stances
> 
> also i both love and hate writing dave lalonde he is an impossible boy
> 
> alsox2 though i love writing pesterlogs i hated coding this holy SHIT i hate coding pesterlogs on ao3 its like grappling with python just fucking dripping in that ever-elusive snake oil. i probably could've written another chapter in the time it took me to add a bunch of spans and shit


End file.
